


cracked

by Dovey



Series: Bittersweet Treats [7]
Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Haruno Sakura, Haruno Sakura-centric, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Chuunin Exams, Strong Haruno Sakura, chuunin exams au, hardcore sakura, konoha as a political state, morally dubious haruno sakura, sakura kills sasuke, the forest of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dovey/pseuds/Dovey
Summary: Konoha might be 'the nice' hidden village, but it's still got a torture division.When Sasuke Uchiha left the village, and Sakura offered to go with him.This is how Konoha sees it: Sasuke was a traitor who left, and Sakura was a traitor who stayed.





	cracked

She is hollow. 

This is how she looks at it, for a very long time: a cracked shell of an egg with the yolk dripping out. Messy and fragile. This changes, when the village is done with her. She doubts it’s for the better. 

Her life, she would say, starts like this: On the street. Cold. Thin clothes stitched together just barely, and thick skin roped in scars. All of her is patchwork, in this moment, except for her eyes- they’re like glass. Ghost eyes, to the shuddering people around her, none of whom will look too long. She’s meant as a warning. Getting put to use in the only way left. 

Her birth is a dangerous one, if you look at it like this. Three years in the womb. It’s a comparison that drifts in her head and makes her laugh, harsh and wrong, with a disused throat. She hasn’t had a womb of her own in years, and it’s the only reason she’s out. 

She can still remember making that choice. It was from before she was born. Ten years old in the kuinichi class, and they’d passed out the papers to all the girls with little boxes to mark their choices. Sakura had used bright green ink to mark hers, and only with a little hesitation- but she’d never wanted kids, and statistics didn’t lie. If she kept all her parts, she’d run the risk of pregnancy, being put on leave if a honey mission caught a fly with a particularly useful doujutsu. She didn’t want that.

So when they’d finished interrogating her, they’d checked those old forms, seen that little green tick in the box, and knew she wouldn’t be useful in the system. They sent her out. They thought now, now she was that hollow little shell she’d once seen herself as- decorative. 

_ That’s what happens, when you don’t serve your village.  _ The whispers are obvious, no reason to hide it. She’ll be of no use to anyone, except maybe to sweep up a shop, and that’s the way the agents like it. 

But they made a mistake: Sakura was not hollow anymore. They’d scooped her out and crumbled her walls, and what was left was Inner, nothing but Inner. This was how she was born- torn apart, piece by piece, day by day, until all that was left was instincts and the bare bones of an emotional outlook. It’s more than enough. 

She’s left on the street and she makes her way out to the edge of it all. Away from the stares and the suffocating walls. She shuffles down a path where the trees grow taller and the air turns bitter cold with the force of the breeze, and her hands twist along the old trunks and taste centuries in their knots. 

She missed this. She’d once been something of a city girl, but now the thought of walls sends her heart into a frenzy.

It’s like this: Sasuke Uchiha left the village, and Sakura offered to go with him.

It’s like this: Sasuke was a traitor who left, and Sakura was a traitor who stayed.

It’s like this: Sakura suffered.

Konoha has no time for traitors, especially useless little girls with no real skills and no real family. None that  _ count,  _ in this village built for clans that barely let the civilians seep through the cracks as it is. She’s shoved into interrogation and chewed apart, spit up and passed along. It doesn’t take much for them to realize how little she can offer them; she’s just a lovesick little girl. She doesn’t know anything about the outside, doesn’t have anything valuable she could let slip. She’d even been turned down, so there’s no point to using her as bait. 

So she gets put to other uses. Practice for the new interrogators. Biological study for the medics. New psychological techniques, genjutsu tricks; she was one of a startlingly number of expendable test subjects kept on hand. Eventually, of course, she stops proving useful for this- no more reactions, nothing else to take note on. Useless to the state, and a waste of resources.

She can’t help produce heirs, and she can’t serve in the military, so they leave her on the street as a reminder. Older shinobi know what glassy eyes and trembling hands mean, even if they pretend not to. It’s a very good lesson, at such a low cost. 

The first to find her is Anko.

Anko’s hands shake too, Sakura knows, because she’s seen it before. She knows how it works. Pretty boys are all the same- you can’t trust them, can’t listen, can’t look. They learned the same lesson, at the same age. Sakura was thrown out, but Anko was swallowed whole- part of the beast that made her.

Sakura knows, in way that comes from intimate familiarity, that Anko hates her job. Hates her coworkers, and her boss. Hates herself, more often than not. Hides it just as well as she hates it, because Anko has learned her lesson. They both have- better than anyone, these two. It’s not often Konoha lets you live and lets you out, twiceover mercies that make them pitiable miracles. 

They both have a sweet tooth. Sakura finds herself growing fond. The woman doesn’t say much, when they’re together, but she shares some food and some weapons. That’s risky, for a person in her position- always tenuous.  _ When I burn this village to the ground,  _ Sakura decides,  _ I will make sure Anko survives.  _ It’s not a serious threat, but the hope of the idea is sometimes all she can cling to. 

The second to find her is a full year later, and she looks a mess when it happens. Chuunin exams are to be set in the forest again, and the early scouts inspecting for anything particularly dangerous stumble across her mid-kill. She kills to eat, after all, and she hasn’t bothered to make it clean in ages- there’s no point, as far as she can tell. 

She’d used an electric jutsu to stun it, one she’d picked up from a man who’d tested it out on her body and decided it too ineffective for a finishing move in battle, but only after running the test for an unending hour, searing the memory of the motions into her half-fried brain. So: She shocked the oversized tiger-like beast, and then stabbed it through the heart when it was frozen. She’s all brute strength in this, hand deep in the flesh of the breast of the beast and kunai meeting the heart, but Anko couldn’t risk spiriting her any bigger weapons and her last spear fashioned from a kunai and branch had snapped on her previous dinner. So there she is, half charged with her own electric shock, sweating like crazy, splattered in blood. Three oversized beasts around her, dead, because she needs to store meat for the upcoming winter and it was either fight the whole pack at once or die. To be honest, she’d expected to die. 

“You want a job?” the Jounin asks, and Sakura smiles with all her teeth and none of her heart.  _ No,  _ she wants to say. But she doesn’t: Sakura learned her lesson. It’s not a real question. 

She’s not put on a genin team again. She’s shuffled off with a mix of chuunin and genin from the war, the ones too messed up to put up through the official trials; they’d get promoted through activity duty or not at all, because they’re not the type you can show off in exams. Some are never going to get promoted, have served since the war and will serve after the next one. That’s what they say, and Sakura doesn’t question their certainty; villages like theirs, there’s always a next war. 

They teach her little tricks. It’s all they’ve got. She passes on her electric shock jutsu to the ones who can handle it, warns them about the side effects. There’s another girl close to her age, got teeth like a wolf and a sarcastic bite to match. She teaches Sakura how to turn her hands into claws, shark and thick like kunai, and it’s a bastardization of the Inuzuka jutsus- just like me, the girl says, with a laugh that scratches at Sakura’s ears and her heart- and she can tell in the way that it  _ hurts,  _ the way the bones creak when they shift and the pain that comes from it all, that this was learned from shadows and averted eyes. They only kiss once and then the girl’s dead in a subterfuge mission that Sakura didn’t have the clearance for, and her supplies get burned to cover their tracks, and all that’s that. Sakura never got to learn her name. 

There’s a man in his thirties like Kakashi-Sensei, missing an eye and always tired, and he tells Sakura about all the wars when they’re stuck in the trees waiting for enemy nin to find them. He’s a civilianborn too, cracks jokes about the early mornings and the childhood teasing they both endured, and he teaches her how mold water into mist, drills her on her jutsu until she can do them all with a single handsign or less. He dies and this time she’s there for it, can’t leave her spot in a tree and he uses the electric trick she taught him to stop the heart of the woman who’s got a hand on his neck, and they’re both dead, and he’s too big for Sakura to bring back.

She hopes he was already dead. It was hard to tell, and she couldn’t have saved him if he wasn’t, so she left without checking. She stills feels bad about that, but she’d do it again. She knows she’d feel worse if she had known for sure. 

She gets a field promotion, and then another one, and then she’s got a mask. She’s pretty sure that means she’s doing a good job. Then she gets an important assignment, and she figures that’s confirmation. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. 

The task is simple: there’s a boy who’s a traitor-  _ like her, like her, don’t hesitate or they’ll know-  _ who’s outlived his usefulness-  _ be useful, be useful, and they’ll keep you around-  _ and she needs to leave with a team of sympathetics and kill him despite their probable interference. 

Here’s the funny thing: she doesn’t remember him at first. 

Naruto is easy to recall. He’s loud an annoying and never had respect for the concept of personal space, and now that she inforces it with nails instead of fists he’s finally learning to back off. Kakashi reminds her too much of  _ Hopefully Dead You Fucking Traitor _ to focus on, but he’s easy, familiar. Sakura thinks maybe she worked a mission or two with him, when they both had their masks on, but there’s no way to tell. But Sasuke is slippery in her head. Like when her head finally cracked, the yolk that dripped out was him, and now it’s run too much to fit it back in. She keeps forgetting his name, has to make sure she’s got his face down every few hours, because otherwise she might attack the wrong enemy. 

It’s not hard, is the thing. It would’ve been, probably, before. He’s a talented man, better than her, but he hesitates. Constantly. She picked up on it early, in his long winded speeches and his posturing at the cliff. He doesn’t want to kill at all, or at least not Naruto, and that’s fine. He won’t have to, and maybe that means she’s doing him a favor. 

Sakura kind of hopes she isn’t. The sight of him doesn’t spark any memories of the boy himself, but it does remind her of the time her in her cell when she whittled down and emptied out. She doesn’t like that.

So she kills him by moving fast and by not getting distracted, and she takes his head clean off because it’s hard to tell if a nin’s truly dead unless you take them apart. She’s got his head in her hands and a stone in her throat, and she’s almost certain he’s dead, and it’s like the forest all over again, a fight she thought she’d lose and an intruder on her victory. 

“How could you?” Naruto wails, and he leaps for her, already turning red. “How could you betray us like that? We were your team!” 

She wants to say  _ No.  _ She wants to say  _ where were you when I needed you? Where were you when I was the one who needed saving, training, connections?  _ She wants to say a lot. She doesn’t. 

Sakura learned her lesson. Choices are for lucky boys with bright futures and birthrights in blood. Until those choices catch up with them, and she hopes she gets to be the one to deliver their consequences. 

She still feels hollow, wooden, ready to shatter. But it still makes her laugh. It’ll give her something to think about, until she burns the whole village down. A hobby of sorts. That’s not so bad. 

**Author's Note:**

> ages ago i wrote about this when i had a blog that i've since deleted bc Depression (tm). regardless, it's still a concept i'm stuck on. I never would've tried to turn it into something fullfledged if the super talented artist 'sakura deserves better' hadn't made a really fantastic...amv? i think its called? for it. Sometimes i go back and rewatch it and it got me inspired because this really is a HC i feel works for canon and is also pretty terrifying. here's the amv in question:  
> https://sakura-deserves-better.tumblr.com/post/176485519264/i-promise-ill-finish-it-one-day-and-clean-it-up  
> also anko is great. thats all.


End file.
